The most dramatic change to this strategy is obviously the single tank aspect. Since most common strategies leave poison head alive the entire time as to enable raid stacking, the physical damage this head will deal is actually higher than the spell damage done from ranged (Megaera's Rage) and adds complications to the standard strategy. Here's how you do this fight, assuming poison head never is the kill target:

1. Begin by pulling both heads and tanking in the center of them so their breaths cross-fire into one another. Melee need be aware of the breath rotation, and are less desirable than ranged for this encounter. Melee can focus on the nether wyrm adds instead of heads later into the fight.

2. During each rampage, gain threat onto the poison head so it doesn't have threat on anyone else after rampage and will instead just cast Megaera's Rage on you from across the room. When rampage ends, melee range tank the head that is going to die (the non-poison head).

3. As far as handling the cinders and icy beam, warlock portals are useful but are not required. Develop your own strategy to handle these, but it shouldn't be overly-complicated as compared to normal.

4. Add-handling. Another benefit of this strategy is heads die faster, so there's less adds. Figure out your way of killing the adds, and when to ignore them with CC, but they shouldn't be a limiting factor.

It's really that simple. The only difficult part will be surviving the breaths as a tank solo, which can be achieved through some of the tips offered below. Your DPS should be through-the-roof by having a tank with insane vengeance from taking damage from both heads and adding another DPS on the head full-time.

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CD rotation for breaths on the paladin tank (assuming you only get 2 per head since you have extra DPS):1st Blue/Green*Pain Suppression*Divine Protection (Unglyphed)---1st Red/Green*Divine Protection (Unglyphed)*Guardian of Ancient Kings---1st Purple/Green*Ardent Defender*Divine Protection (Unglyphed)---

--------------------------------Key aspects:1. Ensuring the Rot Armor debuff from the poison head will fall before the next Rot Armor breath after the preceding rampage is critical. In order to do this, you must control your DPS in your raid to slow or halt DPS if your stack has a remaining duration above 37 seconds. This isn't difficult but may require a couple pulls to master.

2. Lust on the final arcane head - this will make it easier and reduce RNG.

3. Pain suppression is your friend and other external CDs that aren't required for rampage healing. I found that I only needed Pain Suppression on the first breath of each Blue/Green head.

4. The benefits to this approach is healers don't have to spread to heal two tanks, the damage intake is entirely predicted into one source, and all DPS is effectively dumped into the head that needs to die.

5. It is more efficient to tank the last blue/green from the left side of blue so that the green is casting Megaera's Rage as opposed to meleeing, as it has dramatically increase attack speed at this time.

Grommash wrote:So doing this melee aren't ideal at all? This is something I'd want to try but our DPS might be a lot lower as we would be running 2 melee DPS to make this work.

2 melee DPS is fine as long as they optimize DPS on the head while dodging the cross-fire from breaths. The main point you'd have to test is if you can push each head before casting a third breath. The first head will be the most difficult as you don't have extra time during a Rampage to get the head to about 70%, but if you can surpass that you will be fine.

Alright thanks, I think this is something we might try. Centralized damage on one head (because the tank damage isn't wasted on the non-kill head) should make the DPS requirement quite a bit more relaxed.

We two tank it atm but i have thought about 1 tanking too. Unfortunately for us the adds just fuck us over at the 2nd purple head. WE have a mage, moonkin, fury warrior, warlock, but apprentyl not enough stuns??? Idk what they do thats wrong but we always have 10+ adds going into rampage which rapes since we have no stuns left.

Donatist wrote:We two tank it atm but i have thought about 1 tanking too. Unfortunately for us the adds just fuck us over at the 2nd purple head. WE have a mage, moonkin, fury warrior, warlock, but apprentyl not enough stuns??? Idk what they do thats wrong but we always have 10+ adds going into rampage which rapes since we have no stuns left.

Do you lust on the 2nd purple head or the fire? Try the 2nd purple head lust it should help. If not try solo tanking.

It was a L2P issue for add control. Didnt matter if we lusted red or purple tbh we tried both. Killed it this week along with Durumu. But i gotta say i was a bit upset we never tried one tanking it Hopefully they let me one tank it this week.. The reason we couldnt try it was because the melee were to frightened.

Donatist wrote:It was a L2P issue for add control. Didnt matter if we lusted red or purple tbh we tried both. Killed it this week along with Durumu. But i gotta say i was a bit upset we never tried one tanking it Hopefully they let me one tank it this week.. The reason we couldnt try it was because the melee were to frightened.

2 tanked it though was fine, just was left to add control.

One tanking will be fun and helps you neglect adds greatly as the heads drop fast as fock. Also you can probably get rank 1 parses this way!

Thanks for posting that up! I was really really hoping you would get that up in time for us We will be most likely hitting this up tonight assuming we can get that council finished off. Between your writeup and the video it explained exactly in fine detail what I wanted to know before I even have to step foot in the instance.

I don't think it necessarily trivializes it though for other people thinking about attempting it. It makes healing far more focused and will up your damage by a decent amount, but you have to be way more careful with positioning, also certain areas are a bit off-limits.

Gear will help with this strategy a lot though. The second round of heads more so than others benefit from more raid DPS (especially the one you lust on) because you can easily beat the second rot armor, and sometimes beat the second fire/arcane breath depending on which one you lust one. On the first set of heads you might need to halt DPS a bit because of the timing with rot armor, but it's not too big of a deal.

As far as cinders/icy torrent interaction I'd suggest against trying to over-complicate it. Don't bother clearing the ones in the back and only get the ones that are near the front of the raid. Otherwise we just instantly dispelled cinders if there was no ice up front, or the person who got cinders was really far away to make it to the front. We flat out ignored cinders clearing icy ground on the final two heads and just made sure that we managed icy grounds really well up to that point.

First time we made it to the final rampage we one shot it as most people should. You don't have to worry about your poor icy torrents, cinders or add control as it's pretty much a burn. The only thing that can wipe you at that point is the tank dying and the heads breathing on your raid I'd imagine.

I would mention for handling Cinders and Icy Beam we used a warlock portal, as soon as you got the debuff you used the portal to the back and ran to the right or left, then use cinders to clear the portal and GG you can have everyone stacked at range.

Green still breathes on you, it's cone depends on the angle in which it's facing.

It's something I can't really describe but our melee can 100% DPS every head without taking breath damage or moving away while breath is casting. The space on each head is very small but like mentioned it can be done.

1 Tanking can actually make the fight much easier even if your dps is high enough to 2 tank. As long as you can still get 2 breaths, you can run 1 tank 4 healers and trivialize Rampages. A disc priest (or two) makes this a whole lot easier with atonement healing, but its doable even without that. For reference, this is exactly what we did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7BHbEQBCn4

When two tanking, what timing window are you aiming for between heads? Is it still aimed at getting 2 breaths per head with 2t/3h/5d? or are you more aiming to maintain 3-breaths per head?

We started working on this tonight, and once people learned the movement with debuffs, we managed to get some decently consistent 3-4 heads down attempts, but it seemed as though our DPS was really behind. When I was tanking the kill-target head, we'd reliably get 3-breaths per head, but when my warrior co-tank was on the heads we'd get 4 typically, as his DPS/rotation isn't that strong I feel. Is it pretty much a no-go if we get 4 breaths on a few heads? (I know blue will stun on a 4th and red rapes with a 4th as well, but is it doable? Or with 4 will we just get too behind with the adds?

I also found we would manage heads a bit better while CCing adds as much as we could, but would end up with too many/people would die from the 150k nukes they do.

Would it be safe to assume if we're getting 4 breaths while 2-tanking, that 1-tanking may be our only way to stay on top of the DPS checks in the fight?

You really don't want the 2nd blue and red heads to get more than 2 breaths, the tank dmg from 3 flame breaths is nasty but it's mostly the number of add spawns from those heads been up that length of time that you want to avoid.

Sounds like your dps need to stop slacking :/ Make sure non of them are wasting cd's on the purple heads as you get zero adds from first purple and very few from the 2nd.

We only had a couple of pulls solo tanking before deciding that it wasn't worth spending the time to learn the positioning, might be worth you trying it, I would just imagine that if your close to 4 breaths while 2 tanking you'll still get 3 much of the time when solo and 3 stacks from red head plus the extra dmg from green is going to be a bitch to heal.

Edit: Sry just re read that and realised it's not very helpful. When you say you where cc'ing the adds what do you mean?We always try to group the adds up on the tank that has the kill head (dropping RF on green can help avoid your healing aggro pulling them there) aoe stuns and silences like RoP Solar beam glyphed holy wrath ect should then be used but don't waste any dps on them just leave splash dmg to kill them and finish them off during rampage.If your struggling to gather the adds up I find running out between breaths can help.

Best of luck

One last thing if you haven't tried council or primo yet we found both of those fights to be easier than meg.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

Thanks again for the 1-tanking tactic. We've also healed it with 4 healers - so thanks again for that too.

I've got a followup question however:

Are you guys having problems with Rot Armor from the Venom Head on the 2nd Arcane aswell?

We seem to always get one Rot Armor on the Raid on the 2nd Arcane Head. I'm tanking this fight and my position is as perfect as it can be. I've compared several videos and I'm not doing anything different. We always hit the Sweetspot where our Rogue can damage the heads full time on every position without having to move at all or getting hit (usually) by breathes.

Are we running into positional issues here? Our rogue got breathed on alot last night which usually doesn't happen either. I know my positioning didnt change (lets face it, once you have your spot you have your spot thats pretty easy to remember).

So I guess my question is - do you guys know how to avoid those breathes? Is there a trick to it (I mean like, the head bugs out and you can avoid it by doing xxx)

Or do we just have positional isses? I know we're getting pushed further towards the front of the room at the end of the fight and we run out of room. We usually clear the Frostpatches quite well up until the 2nd Fire head. After that, we always seem to run out of room.